CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

We may entertain some fear that the style
of scientific writing in the present day
is becoming bald, careless, and even
defective in philosophical accuracy. If
so, the study of Mr. Babbage's writings
would be the best antidote.
1

Babbage is remembered today primarily for his
invention of the computer, and that invention is the subject
of this thesis. However, Babbage's interests and labors
in fact covered a very wide range of subjects, and to
picture his life as predominantly devoted to the invention
and unsuccessful construction of calculating machines
would be misleading. It is therefore intended to provide
here, by way of introduction, a general biographical
sketch, although it must be both superficial and highly
selective.
2

Charles Babbage was born on December 26, 1791. His
father, Benjamin Babbage, was a partner in a London bank.
After private tutoring and two private schools. Charles
entered Cambridge University in 1810, attending first
Trinity College and then Peterhouse, from which he graduated
in 1814.

In June, 1814, Babbage married Georgians Whitmore, and
they went to live at his father's house, at 5 Devonshire
Street, London. The marriage produced eight children, but
only three sons survived to adulthood. In early 1827,
Babbage's father died, leaving him an estate of about
100,000 pounds; in the fall, Georgiana died.
Considerably distraught, Babbage spent most of 1828 on a
European tour, recovering his spirits. When he returned,
he moved to a new house at 1 Dorset Street, Manchester
Square, London, where he was to remain the rest of his
life; the children were left in the care of his mother,
in Devonshire Street.

Although Babbage .spent the rest of his life with his
family around him only occasionally, he was by no means
a solitary man. For many years he gave evening parties
every Saturday during the season which were attended by
some two to three hundred people, and to which invitations
were in great demand. He was himself in great demand as
a dinner guest, and he was acquainted with practically
every prominent scientific, literary and social figure
of the era.

Only in old age did he become somewhat crotchety.
During the last ten years of his life a considerable part
of his energy went into attempting to prevent organ grinders
and other musicians from playing in the streets and
soliciting money, as they interrupted his work and
destroyed his concentration. His efforts were basically
futile and became quite a preoccupation, yet they were not
fundamentally eccentric, as many of Babbage's
contemporaries agreed with him that street musicians were a
genuine public nuisance. Babbage's campaign ended with his
death on October 18, 1871.

Babbage's first mayor scientific interest was in
mathematics. Having largely taught it to himself, he soon
found that he knew more than his tutor at Cambridge.
Finding that they could not fruitfully study mathematics
as part of their formal education, Babbage and a number of
friends, most notably John Herschel and George Peacock,
formed themselves into the Analytical Society. As one of
the main aims of this Society was to promote the notation
for the calculus devised by Leibniz and in use on the
Continent, as opposed to the Newtonian notation which was
holding back British mathematics, Babbage suggested that
they call their first volume of Memoirs: "The Principles of
Pure D-ism in opposition to the Dot-age of the University."

They intended to alter the teaching of mathematics,
and this required a textbook from which the new material could
be learned; but as Babbage, Herschel and Peacock were
not established figures, a work of their own would not
be accepted; therefore they produced a translation of the
Differential and Integral Calculus by Lacroix, which was
published in 1816; a few years later two volumes of
Examples to accompany the text were issued. Although
there were some individuals and groups apart from the
Analytical Society working toward the same ends, and
although the important works published by the Society were
mostly joint productions, Babbage, as the principal
organizer of the Society, played a key role in the reform
and revitalization of British mathematics in the first
half of the nineteenth century.

By 1820, Babbage had published seventeen mathematical
papers, and had established his name in scientific
circles. In March, 1816, he had been elected to Fellowship
in the Royal Society. That same month he first
applied for a teaching position, one of a long series of
jobs which he sought without success, despite the fact that
he was often better qualified than the candidate who
got the post. He concluded, probably correctly, that the
positions were being handed out on the basis of social
connection, not scientific merit.

Fortunately for Babbage, his father's wealth meant .
that this failure to get a job did not force him out of
science. This failure did, however, strengthen his belief
in the importance of the reform of scientific institutions,
and gave to his efforts in this regard a fervor, sometimes
even a bitterness, that was to win him many enemies.
3

In 1820, Babbage played an important role in the
foundation of the Astronomical Society of London (later the
Royal Astronomical Society). He was not the dominant
social or scientific figure among the founders - unlike
his good friend John Herschel he did no significant original
work in astronomy; but Babbage was largely responsible for
the initial organization of the Society, and he served as
its first Secretary.

It was while proofreading some tables being prepared
for the Astronomical Society that Babbage developed an
interest in calculating machines which led to his invention
of the Difference Engine in 1822. His efforts to construct
this machine, with massive if rather uneven government
support, were his major preoccupation for over a decade.
This will be described in detail in Chapter Two, but it
is important to keep in mind at this point that it served
to further divert him from a more conventional scientific
career, as he was reluctant to take on any responsibilities
which he felt would interfere with his completion of the
Difference Engine.

However, Babbage's universal interests and boundless
energy could not be channeled into a single project. In
1824, he was retained for a time as an advisor to a group
of men intending to form a new life insurance company,
but the firm was dissolved before it actually got launched.
Another company offered to hire him as its manager, but he
declined in order to devote his time to the Difference
Engine. However, he wrote up what he had found out about
the operation of existing insurance companies into a popular
treatise on the subject, which appeared in English in
1826 and in German in 1827. Another 1826 publication was
a laboriously prepared volume of logarithmic tables,
which set a new standard for freedom from error; this
volume appeared in several English and foreign editions.

While Babbage was on his European tour in 1828,
following his wife's death, he attended the meeting in
Berlin of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher and
Artze, organized by Alexander von Humboldt. Babbage was
impressed by this organization, and on his return to
England, he published an account of the meeting. At
this time a considerable struggle was going on within the
Royal Society over the question of its reform. Babbage
became the leader of the group pushing for change by his
publication, in 1834, of Reflections of the Decline of
Science in England and on Some of its Causes. This book
became the focus of a widespread and often bitter argument
over whether English science, and particularly the Royal
Society, deserved to be the pride or the disgrace of the
nation. Eventually, the foundation in 1831 of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science largely resolved
this conflict, the Association being modeled on the.German
Gesellschaft, which was much admired by the reformers.
Although Babbage was a leading figure in the group that
launched the Association, he did not play a vital role in
the Association Itself.. He served as one of the three
permanent Trustees of the Association from its beginning
until August, 1838, but at that point a dispute over a
supposed promise of the Presidency of the Association to
Babbage caused him to resign, and he had little to do with
the Association for the rest of his life. He was, however,
responsible for forming the Statistical Section of the
Association, and then, in 1834, for transforming it into
the Statistical Society of London.

During this period Babbage also sought more general
social reform as a candidate for a seat in Parliament in
the elections of January, 1833. However, he did very badly,
in part because of rumors that he had misappropriated funds
given to him by the government for construction of the
Difference Engine.

When Babbage undertook the construction of the Difference
Engine, he had to become knowledgeable about machinery and
manufacturing processes; to this end, he visited a large
number of factories in various parts of England, and others
during his tour of the Continent. His interest became more
general, and his various findings and speculations
appeared in 1832 in the book On the Economy of Machinery
and Manufactures. This work, combining economics and
operational research in a pioneering way, was immensely
successful, being published in many England and American
editions, and translated into most European languages.
4

In 1834, Babbage invented the Analytical Engine, and
work on it was to absorb most of his energy for the rest of
his life, although there were periods during which he
laid it aside. This Engine and related matters will be
discussed in Chapters Three and Four.

Throughout his life, Babbage advocated the application
of scientific methods to practical problems. A good example
of this was a long series of experiments he conducted in
1839 in connection with the disputes over the proper
gauge for railway tracks. He obtained the loan of a
railway car, and filled it with equipment which would
automatically record on long rolls of paper the various forces
to which the carriage was subjected, its speed, sway, and
so on. He called for the installation on all engines of
devices to record certain information on all trips, so
that the causes of accidents could be studied after they
occurred, in much the same way that airplanes now have
black boxes to record pertinent flight data.

An accomplishment of which Babbage was particularly
proud, but which did not prove to be influential, was his
invention of a special mechanical notation, by means of
which the character, function and motion of the different
pieces of a machines could be symbolically represented on
a drawing or schematic diagram. Babbage used this mechanical
notation extensively while working on his own calculating
machines, and he thought it would be most valuable if
used generally by engineers and mechanics, even serving
as an aid to invention itself. Although he tried to get
publicity and acceptance for it, this notation was generally
ignored, perhaps because it was too complex and arbitrary
to be learned easily, and so geared to his own peculiar
modes of thought that its personal value could not become
a general one.

Babbage did make valuable contributions to almost every
principal field of human endeavor, with the exception of
music. He wrote on mathematics, physics, astronomy,
geology, theology, economics, statistics and government,
He wrote a satirical play; he invented the opthalmoscope
and the method of distinguishing different lighthouses
by coded occulatations; he was a master at undoing locks
and ciphers; he was a pioneer of central heating and
theatrical lighting. In all, he published some eighty
books and papers during his life.

Many of Babbage's writings were brief and incomplete,
often because they were intended as temporary diversions
from his other work. Yet it is not true, as is sometimes
charged, that little of his work was important. Nothing
that he did had all the polish or perfection that could be
desired, and no single achievement can be said to have
been wholly worthy of him; but in several vital areas -
mathematics, scientific organization, the application of
science to technology, machining capabilities, and the
application of mathematics to the study of society - his
cumulative actions had a substantial impact on the
development of British society.

Towards its end, Babbage's life appears rather sad, for
he became somewhat bitter about his failure to gain the
honor he felt he deserved, and he felt deeply the lack of
any single monument to his abilities. Yet in the last
analysis, Babbage's life cannot be judged by the sum of his
accomplishments; quite apart from the truly prophetic
quality of his invention of the Analytical Engine, we must
say with one of his contemporaries:

Let it be granted that in his life there was much to
cause disappointment, and that the results of his
labours, however great, are below his powers. Can we
withhold our tribute of admiration to one who
throughout his long life inflexibly devoted his
exertions to the most lofty subjects? . . . He nobly
upheld the character of a discoverer and inventor,
despising any less reward than to carry out the highest
conception which his mind brought forth. His very
failures arose from no want of industry or ability,
but from excess of resolution that his aims should be
at the very highest.
5

Footnotes:

2.
As this biographical sketch is not intended to be
definitive, no documentation will be provided. The sources
of information on Babbage's life are discussed at length
in the bibliographical appendix.

3.
Ironically, the only distinguished scientific post that
Babbage ever held was the Lucasian Professorship at
Cambridge University, and it was not offered to his until
after he no longer really wanted it. He accepted with
reluctance, and served without distinction from 1829 to
1839,.when he resigned to devote all his energy to the
Analytical Engine.

4.
But it is not true that Babbage suggested uniform postage
in this book, nor is there any evidence that he was
instrumental in its adoption by the Post Office.

5.
From the obituary of Babbage in Nature, Vol. V (1871-72),
p. 28-29.